But as more information emerged—disclosing the American dead and wounded, the difficulties the huge American force had in quelling a small force of Cuban defenders, the bombing of a hospital, communications foul-ups, and other military blunders—public attitudes shifted. By early December 1983, pollster Louis Harris found that a 65–32 percent majority felt the administration had been wrong not to let reporters accompany troops into Grenada. A similar majority said that excluding reporters might tempt the military to “cover up mistakes or lives lost.”48
Even the administration’s line shifted. Antagonism between the White House and the Washington press corps was white hot. The White House had compounded the initial blunder of excluding the American press by actual deception about the invasion—Larry Speakes had unwittingly lied to reporters the night before the invasion, denying an attack was imminent.
Late that afternoon, Bill Plante, a CBS White House reporter, received a tip from an old intelligence source that the Marines would launch an invasion the next morning. For more than twenty-four hours, Grenada’s government radio had been warning its people that a “military invasion of our country is imminent.” The Pentagon was confirming that a twenty-one-ship naval task force, originally bound for Lebanon with a Marine amphibious landing group, was now “on station” near Grenada. Plante put the question of an invasion to Speakes, who forwarded it to Rear Admiral John Poindexter, then deputy national security adviser. About twenty minutes later, Speakes came back: “Plante, no invasion of Grenada. Preposterous. Knock it down hard.”49
The next morning, Speakes bore the brunt of reporters’ anger over both the news blackout and the deception. An evasion or a “no comment” would have been understood, but not a flat denial of the truth. Later, Speakes told Plante he had answered in ignorance, repeating Poindexter’s exact words. (After he left government in 1987, Speakes publicly chastised Poindexter for “misleading me as press spokesman.”50) The White House press and editors across the nation, doubly infuriated, pushed to get reporters onto Grenada. The first small group went on a restricted basis—fifty-six hours after the initial assault.
In postmortems ten weeks later, the Reagan White House admitted second thoughts. Jim Baker acknowledged, “We took too long to get the press in there on an unrestricted basis” and “perhaps we should have given some consideration to press coverage” from the start.51 Speakes endorsed sending a few reporters with the invasion force. “I think we could have preserved secrecy with a very small pool of reporters involved from the very first,” he said.52 The Pentagon, also somewhat chastened, set up a joint military-press commission, which took months to develop a mechanism for a small press pool to be secretly alerted in future surprise military operations.
Leaks and Lie Detectors
To the press, the Grenada affair epitomized the Reagan administration’s zealotry in tightening secrecy. While Reagan and his top advisers maintained cordial personal relations with reporters, they engaged in the most sweeping efforts of any modern administration in peacetime to restrict the flow of information to the public. The Reagan team’s dual track of cordiality and control is a model sure to be studied, and perhaps attempted, by Reagan’s successors—though the final consequences of aggressive secrecy were fatal for Reagan’s presidency.
Early on, the Reagan administration moved to limit the scope of the Freedom of Information Act by restricting both the type and amount of government material available to the public under this law. It also made the procedures more cumbersome, discouraging written requests. The Pentagon took steps to restrict publication of unclassified academic papers. More broadly, President Reagan issued an executive order in August 1982 giving agencies wide authority to classify information with no time limit—reversing the trend of the previous eighteen years. Reagan was expanding the amount of classified information, despite earlier presidential studies which found too much was already classified. Under Carter, the rule was to release information unless publication would cause “identifiable harm” to national security. The Reagan order leaned the opposite way—it allowed withholding information merely if it “relates” to national security; and it sanctioned reclassifying information already in the public domain. Reagan reversed another policy by allowing the CIA and FBI to monitor and infiltrate press and academic groups if the government saw a national security need.53
In 1985, the Reagan administration obtained the first espionage conviction against a government official, Samuel Loring Morrison, for passing classified photographs to the press—Jane’s Defence Weekly—not to a foreign government (the former standard for espionage).54 CIA Director William Casey pushed for prosecutions of the press for controversial disclosures, and he advocated surprise police raids on newsrooms, though this was barred by a 1980 law; the Reagan White House refused.
In several ways, the administration clamped down on government officials. In March 1983, President Reagan signed NSDD-84, a national security decision directive to require prepublication review—lifetime censorship—for 200,000 or more current and former government officials on any piece of writing or speech, and to make many thousands of officials subject to lie-detector tests. Critics in Congress raised such furor that Reagan suspended the order. But the administration found an alternative—Form 4193—which forced government officials to agree to prepublication review as a condition of being granted access to intelligence material. And by late 1986, 240,000 officials had bowed to this “voluntary” requirement.55 Moreover, in January 1985, the Pentagon announced it would use lie-detector tests for the first time on several thousand nonintelligence employees, not to investigate security breaches, but more generally—to determine their “trustworthiness, patriotism and integrity.” (Such “screenings” jumped from forty-five in 1981 to 4,863 in 1985.)
Washington reporters have felt the squeeze. Walter Cronkite said he was “greatly worried” by the “pattern of restriction” by the Reagan administration. Bill Kovach, former Washington editor of The New York Times, said, “There is no area of government where information is not harder for us to get than it was when I was here in the Nixon and Ford years.” Jack Landau, executive director of the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press, contends the Reagan policies have imposed the “most significant media access restrictions on government information since the end of voluntary censorship in World War II.” Jimmy Carter was even sharper. He called the Reagan restrictions “much more Draconian in nature, much more repressive in nature than anything I remember in the history of our country.”56
In part, Reagan and his high command were reacting to a rash of serious spy cases in the mid-1980s, and their alarm at that threat was warranted. But often, they were trying to combat politically troublesome press leaks. What is surprising is how quickly leaks got under Reagan’s skin. Only-fifteen days after he took office in 1981, Reagan was “ticked off” about leaks of proposed cuts in the foreign aid budget. Within a year he was signing edicts to throttle leaks; a year after that, he declared, “I’ve had it up to my keister with these leaks.”
It is an old gripe in the power game. Lyndon Johnson complained, “This goddamn town leaks like a worn-out boot.” Gerald Ford squawked, “I’m damned sick and tired of a ship that has such leaky seams.” Harry Truman yelped that “ninety-five percent of our secret information has been revealed in newspapers and slick magazines.” Jimmy Carter served notice that “if there is another outbreak of misinformation, distortions, or self-serving leaks, I will direct the secretary of State to discharge the officials responsible … even if some innocent people might be punished.” Richard Nixon’s explosive orders were: “I don’t give a damn how it is done, do whatever has to be done to stop these leaks and prevent further unauthorized disclosures.”57 And that figured in his impeachment.
Washingtonians define leaks in many ways, but generally leaks are inside government information passed anonymously to reporters by government officials. Aggrieved policymakers claim that leaks are “unauthorized” or “premat
ure” disclosures, but often top policymakers do their own deliberate, authorized leaking, in which case the leak is technically a “plant”—information planted in the press to serve the established policy line. But in normal political argot, both types are “leaks” so long as the hand of the perpetrator is hidden. Most leaks play havoc with the White House story line—which, after all, is an effort to shape and limit policy debate.
Leaks are endemic to democracy—not an aberration, but the norm. In our Republic, they go back to George Washington. Aides to Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton leaked to allies of Thomas Jefferson that Hamilton was trying to make the United States a lackey of Britain. The practice has been going on ever since. It is a Utopian notion that leaks can be stopped. In any community, gossip about people and policy is irrepressible unless strong ties of loyalty silence people from talking with outsiders. But government is unlike General Motors, the Catholic Church, The Wall Street Journal, or Harvard University, where long-term career interests and personal ties supposedly breed institutional loyalty. At high levels of government, diverse and highly ambitious people are suddenly thrown together in temporary alliances and learn quickly that they can push their pet ideas in the press, or cut down rivals, with hidden disclosures.
Moreover, some officials such as Dick Darman, a close first-term aide to Reagan and formerly an academic specialist in public policy at Harvard’s graduate school of government, argue that leaks are not only inevitable, but healthy. “If you have homogeneity of ideas in an administration, you’re probably going to be wrong—or right—for a short time and then sterile [of new ideas],” Darman observed. “It’s probably unavoidable, humans being humans, that there’ll be some diversity of views. In any case it’s desirable. If you have diversity of views in the policy debate, you’re going to have winners and losers. Winners leak out of pride in what they have won. Losers leak to try to change policies.”58
Political scientist E. E. Schattschneider argued that the battle over policy always includes a conflict over the size of the political arena, and that leads to leaking. Within an administration, the officials who control policy want to keep the arena narrow. To them, leaks are anathema, especially if their policies are unpopular and would be rejected if widely known. So they often mask their intentions and clamp down on secrecy, as the Reagan White House did on its arms traffic with Iran. But officials who are losing the inside policy debate have incentive to broaden the fight, especially if they sense the public is with them. Leaking to the press is a primary tool of broadening the fight—a standard ploy in the power game.
But policy dissent covers only one motive for leaking. For leaking is a pervasive political art form practiced at all levels of government, by all ideological stripes, for all kinds of purposes. The motives of leakers, sometimes quite obvious and sometimes disguised, are often less sinister than outraged presidents make them sound.
In The Government/Press Connection, Stephen Hess of The Brookings Institution in Washington observed that among the common garden varieties are:
• the goodwill leak: relaying juicy tidbits to reporters in order to earn IOUs in hopes of getting favorable press treatment;
• the ego leak: a favorite of staff aides (though I have gotten them from cabinet members, too), who impart sensitive information for their own vanity to convey the impression, “I am an insider”;
• the grudge leak: a staple of bureaucratic infighting aimed at cutting down the influence or cutting short the career of some rival policymaker with stories about his temper, ineptitude, disloyalty, etc.;
• the trial-balloon leak: often employed by presidential aides to test public reaction to some policy without political risk to the boss;
• the whistle-blower leak: usually by career civil servants or military careerists outraged by waste, dishonesty, or a cover-up on defense contracts or scandalous pricing of Pentagon spare parts, and eager to expose the scandal;
• the policy leak: done at all levels to promote or sabotage some policy line, especially when an administration is divided, which is always (each winter, it is as normal as snowfall for major departments to leak word of intended White House cuts in their budgets, to rally support to save their programs. It became just as seasonal for David Stockman to leak gloomy estimates of the economic outlook and the deficit, to prime Reagan to make tough budget cuts).59
To Hess’s list, I would add:
• the brag leak: usually a staff aide’s leak of some brilliant inside maneuver that makes his boss look good; bosses also leak about themselves,
• the inoculation leak: a gambit, usually by presidential aides, to break forthcoming bad news early to cushion the public reaction (for example, Reagan aides predicting in the summer of 1984 that there would be a rise in interest rates that fall and a leftist guerrilla offensive in El Salvador in October);
• the shortcut leak: a quick way to force presidential attention to some problem or policy idea via the press (the late Henry Cabot Lodge, as U.S. ambassador in Saigon, leaked me his assessments and proposals, sensing they would hit The New York Times front page. “It’s a damn sight easier,” Lodge said, “to get it on the president’s desk that way than to send another cable to the fudge factory”—meaning the State Department);
• the preemptive leak: settling an internal debate over whether to make information public by simply leaking it—as hard-liners did with delicate intelligence assessments about Soviet violations of arms agreements.
Some presidents—Lyndon Johnson was legendary—are notoriously indiscreet leakers themselves, with trial balloons, grudge leaks, or self-serving policy leaks that would look crass if made on the record. James Reston of The New York Times used to say that “government is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.”60 Reagan, who often feigned ignorance about anonymous sources, admitted in his sixth year that “we found that the White House is the leakiest place I’ve ever been in.”61
Garden-variety leaks—even presidential ones—are a staple of every day’s front page and a migraine to White House media managers. One reason leaks are so impossible to control is the well-worn practice of press “backgrounders” in government, a technique begun by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. That game has been going on ever since: Government officials, from presidents down, briefing reporters or floating policy lines without being quoted by name and thereby avoiding direct accountability for the information. Background information can normally be attributed only to “senior administration officials,” “White House officials,” or “Pentagon officials,” depending on who is speaking. For example, Larry Speakes would say no more than a rambling “no comment” to some news development during his regular briefing and then “go on background” to add details or comments or to introduce high officials, who would give full briefings on background. The same group of reporters was present; no one moved—only the rules for reporting changed. These backgrounders are not leaks, but they sanction ways of operating that encourage many officials to go on background to leak.
Most conversations between reporters and officials on national security issues are on background, so the amount of traffic is enormous, often making it hard for reporters to know for certain what is authorized backgrounding, a deliberate plant, or an unauthorized leak. Secrecy frays quickly because of factional disputes and rivalries. The game of leaks is so pervasive that it is hard to find a precise line between what Fred Iklé, undersecretary of Defense for policy, once called hard-core leaks—serious breaches of national security—and soft-core leaks—nuisance disclosures that cause political embarrassment or a negative reaction to policy but pose no real threat to the country. The border zone is large and vague, especially when the wisdom of policy is in dispute. Obviously some classified leaks can harm national security, but usually far fewer than most administrations claim. Generally, high officials bleat because their policy ox has been gored, but they see no principle violated when rivals are wounded.
Quite often, what really riles presidents
and secrecy martinets is the presumed disloyalty of leakers. After one highly publicized Pentagon lie-detector hunt for the source of a leak about a high-level session on military budgeting, Pentagon spokesman Henry E. Catto, Jr., belatedly admitted that the brass were angered not so much by a revelation that would help the Russians but by the fact that information from the hush-hush meeting had leaked within two hours. “I certainly wouldn’t for a minute say that the particular meeting dealing with budget is likely to endanger national defense,” Catto said. “It’s the principle of the thing that we strenuously object to, the expression of minority opinion via leaks to the news media designed to influence the course of events. We feel that things ought to be decided in camera and … policy supported by everyone who stays on the team.”62 In short, the lie detectors were enforcing team discipline and protecting the story line, not national security.
The Secrecy Obsession
Obsession with leaks and a compulsion for secrecy was ultimately the undoing of Reagan’s carefully crafted image game. The political impulse to combat leaks is natural. Any administration prefers to keep its internal debates private until policy is set. But there is a large step from that impulse to believing that policy must be discussed and carried out only by a small band of true believers and that critics and opponents must be kept in the dark. Ironclad secrecy is a tool for a monopolistic control of policy. It becomes a consuming passion when an administration is not leveling with the public, especially about risks it is taking without a solid political consensus.
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